Rackspace adds more power to hosted servers

IT hosting company Rackspace is upgrading its OpenStack-based servers across the board with faster processors as well as more memory and network bandwidth.

The new models are called Performance Cloud Servers and have been built to deliver better application performance, with improved throughput, reliability and scale, Rackspace said in a blog post. They can be used for a variety of workloads, from basic Web hosting to large scale NoSQL data stores like MongoDB and Cassandra, according to Rackspace.

To improve performance, Rackspace has combined Intel's Xeon E5 processors with SSD storage and an increase of the maximum amount of RAM from 30GB to 120GB. The end result is an almost threefold improvement in overall performance, the company said.

Rackspace offers both public and private cloud services, as well a mixture of the two. The new servers are part of public cloud offering, and will compete with products from the likes of Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure.

As the new servers are rolled out, they will replace Rackspace's Standard Cloud Servers as the company's default offering. They are available from the company's data center in northern Virginia, and will soon be available in Dallas, Chicago, and London, as well. The Sydney and Hong Kong regions will then catch up during the first half of next year.

Rackspace offers nine different server configurations that are split into two main groups. The first group offers between 1GB and 8GB of RAM, and is best suited for Web servers, batch processing, network appliances, small databases, and most general-purpose computing workloads, according to Rackspace. With Linux and a standard cloud account, they cost between US$0.04 per hour and $0.32 hour.

The second group of servers offers between 15GB and 120GB of RAM, as well as more disk space for application storage and network bandwidth. They are for applications that need more RAM, disk I/O, and consistent performance, including medium-size to large relational databases, NoSQL data stores, and distributed caches, Rackspace said. They cost between $0.68 per hour and $5.44 per hour. The most expensive model has 120GB of RAM, 40GB SSD system storage, 1,200GB of application storage and 10G bps of aggregate network capacity.

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